


Human Nature

by impossiblyawesome



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Action, Angst, Character Death, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, M/M, what fanfic is complete without revolutions and aliens really let's be honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 04:18:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossiblyawesome/pseuds/impossiblyawesome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(A Doctor Who AU) When the Doctor must become human to hide from a group of aliens known as the 'Family of Blood', he leaves Grantaire to guard the watch containing his Timelord self in revolutionary Paris.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. no trace

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this crossover in my head ages now, but I guess I just had to get it out so it would stop haunting me! It's based on a Doctor Who two-parter, "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood" from Series 3 of new!Who. I hope I've made sense of things enough that you don't necessarily have to be familiar with those episodes or Doctor Who before reading this fic, and in any case I have deviated from the specifics of that plot and brick!canon occasionally in this (whee artistic license).
> 
> It's unbetaed so all mistakes are mine (and there'll probably be a few!) but I hope you enjoy.

_“It won’t be permanent. I promise you that.”_

_“Alright.” Grantaire said, still bewildered._

_“You trust me, don’t you?”_

_“Of course.” He returned, because it was the truest thing in the world._

_Grantaire had trusted him since the very moment they met. Since that night in that alley, when he’d seen the stranger skid round the corner, hastily making for a strange blue box, so doused in shadow it nearly hadn’t been noticeable before. The stranger had stopped before the door and gazed at Grantaire with fire and ice and madness in his eyes. “You should run,” he’d advised, smile fading to seriousness as he glanced behind him once more. Grantaire looked too, and felt his skepticism waver. “Or...” The man added, “you could come with me.”_

_It had been giddy and reckless and wild, it had defied all the reason in the world, but he had never felt so free when he’d taken that outstretched hand._

_He had always, impossibly, trusted him._

_His eyebrows knitted together and he bit his lip, uncertain of being able to shoulder the responsibility. “Do you trust_ me _?”_

_The Doctor smiled and clasped his hand in answer. And then he tore his hand away, and screams of anguish soon wracked the air._

 

* * *

 

Grantaire watches him despairingly. The Doctor’s words carry across the room as if they are destined to inhabit clouds. “The oppressed and downtrodden will remain so unless there is change. While society blindly favours the aristocracy, neither wealth nor blood should bind us to the tradition. Do you not think that all people are worth fighting for? I have never met a person who is not important. So there must be change, and we have the power to incite it. We, with the collective voice of the citizens, can rid the government of their corruption, and when we have - when France is a republic - there can be equality. And with equality, there will be peace. With peace, there can be happiness.”

If the world could be changed with words, the Doctor could have done it, a million times over.

Even as a human.

 _Enjolras_. He still stumbles frequently over the name, his tongue and teeth and throat battling over the two ferociously. It has been a fortnight. Perhaps the longest of his existence.

And it had taken him long enough to even find the Doctor. It had taken time just to comprehend when they were.

 _Where_ had been simpler to discover. The TARDIS had, apparently, parked itself in the shade of a narrow cobbled street, peeking out of an alcove as though it were just another wooden door of just another building. The street’s name hadn’t been visible, though as soon as he’d stumbled out of the alleyway and into an open square, Grantaire could see that he was right in the centre of a city, buildings clustered across the horizon. Paris, still; the Seine ebbed quietly at his right shoulder. He looked to his left, found himself on the fringe of a swarm of pigeons. The birds fled in a frenzy as he leant down and snatched up a grubby newspaper they’d been pecking at. It must have been a few days old, but he gained a rough notion of the date. _May, 1832_.

1832\. Grantaire hadn’t been able to think what that meant, at first. Nearly two centuries before his time. Even the damned Eiffel Tower wouldn’t be built for another forty-five years.

He’d never paid much attention in history lessons, back in his schooldays that seemed lifetimes away (though they _were_ , quite literally). He’d never paid much attention in lessons, full stop. Certainly, a lot of things were interesting, and a lot of the reading he did was on a fleeting whim, but he didn’t like to be force-fed ideas, and were textbooks and lessons and stilted teaching really much better than brainwashing? Grantaire would have reformed the education system himself, only he was already sure it would make no difference. There would always be a system, and the system would never succeed. And how could it, when absolute success was just a lie, an unattainable ideal (an unreachable green light, to rob Fitzgerald of his famous metaphors)?  Even having _no_ system would fail - they’d seen it before, the Doctor and Grantaire, visiting the settlement on a distant planet’s cluster of moons, where education was ‘free’, ‘unlimited’, ‘voluntary’, and no one knew a thing. He’d concluded, quite reasonably, that nothing worked, and that fixing broken things would only break them worse.

Irregardless, they’d missed the Revolution and the guillotine by a close shave, thankfully, and hadn’t ended up during the Dark Ages or a World War, so it had been looking manageable, all things considered. He wouldn’t go so far to say Paris looked h _appy_ , for it was rife with ugly problems - people starving in the streets, an unsympathetic elite, a shackled society in more ways than he could count, and a cholera epidemic to top it all off - but he and the Doctor would only be here briefly. Call it a holiday (albeit an odd one: a holiday where you happened to be in hiding, and were supposed to create and adjust to a false new life at the snap of your fingers, of course). But they only had to survive for a month or so, and then they would vanish as suddenly as they’d arrived.

And they had arrived suddenly, just as they’d left. They had barrelled into the TARDIS, Grantaire trying to keep up with the Doctor and what he was explaining; he was speaking in that matter-of-fact stream of consciousness of his, when the words spewed like lava downhill and nearly none of them made sense.

 _Slow down_ , he wanted to demand, _wait a minute_. But if there was one thing he’d grasped, it was that they didn’t have a minute.

“They’ve got the scent -” The Doctor was saying. “They’ve got the scent, which means they’ve latched onto the TARDIS. And they can follow us through time and space, and they’ll never stop.”

“Never stop until _what_?” Grantaire interjected, stepping backwards as the Doctor lunged in front of him to fiddle with a dial. 

The Doctor was still flicking switches, typing into the incomprehensible keypad. Grantaire almost thought he didn’t have an answer, but then the words flew out as fast as before.

“Until they have _me_.” He sounded impassive. “They’re not, specifically, after me; they don’t know who I am. But they know what I am. They need a Timelord.”

It was as though the Doctor heard Grantaire’s silent _why?_ , the question he had barely had time to ask before he was receiving an answer.

“They need to feast upon a Timelord. The Family of Blood, they call themselves. Parasites, you’d say; leeches. But these creatures are hunters, too. They can sniff out anyone. They won’t ever stop.” Fantastic.

“Luckily, they’ll only survive a short time without me.”

“So we can outrun them, then?” Grantaire questioned.

The Doctor stared at him.

“Did they see you?” He demanded. Grantaire’s brows crashed together in confusion; that was no answer to his question.

“What do you mean?”

“Did they _see_ you?” The Doctor repeated, more harried than Grantaire ever saw him. “Did they catch your face? Would they recognise you if they passed you in the street?”

Grantaire recalled the chase, the race to the TARDIS, and he wasn’t certain. How was he supposed to remember, exactly? How did he know what they’d seen or hadn’t seen?”

“No, I -” He answered finally, wondering if that was the answer the Doctor was looking for. “I don’t think they saw me.” He’d barely gotten a look at them, after all, and surely if they’d seen either of them, it would have been the Doctor they’d taken note of first, as always. Understandably. As it should be.

 _Why?_ He thought again, but by then the Doctor had leapt back from the console, was wrestling with controls at one of the outer walls of the central room. Grantaire would _help_ if he was given something to do.

“We can’t outrun them.” The answer to Grantaire’s question came belatedly, abruptly, sharply.

“Then what can -”

The Doctor’s face was taut, his gaze focused upwards, into empty space.

“We hide.” He said, meeting Grantaire’s eyes with an discomforting graveness. “Wait until they die.”

Grantaire frowned. “But if they have your scent -”  

“I can disguise my scent. They smell a Timelord, yes. But if I disguise the scent for long enough, they’ll expend the remains of their lifespan eventually.”

“How?”

“I’m going to become human.”

Well, that made utterly no sense.

“There’s not enough time to explain properly. But it all depends on you.”

Well, how? What? But -

“Take this watch, Grantaire.” The Doctor impressed this on him with a solemn gaze. “This watch, my life depends on it. I’ve put a perception filter on it; I won’t look at it. Keep it safe. Don’t open it unless you have to. Don’t open it, except as a last resort. Don’t open it unless they find us.”

He stared at the small circle of silver, pressed up against the Doctor’s palm. Old and scratched and unassuming, suddenly the most significant object in the world. It couldn’t possibly just be a watch.

The Doctor answered again before he had asked. “This watch is me.” 

Grantaire could only stand, dumbstruck, uncomprehending.

Something dropped from the rafters of the TARDIS, a helmet, a strange contraption -

The Doctor clicked the watch onto it, and pulled it over his blond hair, metal nodes pressing against his temples.

“Never thought I’d use this.” He mused, with the barest hint of hesitance. “All the times I’ve wondered...”

“What is it?”

“Chameleon Arch. Rewrites my biology. Literally changes every single cell in my body.”

“You’ll be human.” Grantaire couldn’t halt himself in his approach, a half-desperate plea for another option.

The Doctor gave him a look of shivering sympathy, a look that tore through all of Grantaire’s will. “The TARDIS will take care of everything for me. Find a setting, invent a lifestory for me, and integrate me. Can’t do the same for you... you’ll just have to improvise. I should have just enough residual awareness to let you in.”

There were problems, too many problems, thousands of them.

“Isn’t it going to hurt?”

“Oh, yes. I expect so.”

“But you’ll turn back, when they’re gone?”

The Doctor assured him with a single nod.

“It won’t be permanent. I promise you that.”

“Alright.” Grantaire said, still bewildered.

“You trust me, don’t you?”

“Of course.” He returned, because it was the truest thing in the world.

Grantaire had trusted him since the very moment they met. Since that night in that alley, when he’d seen the stranger skid round the corner, hastily making for a strange blue box, so doused in shadow it nearly hadn’t been noticeable before. The stranger had stopped before the door and gazed at Grantaire with fire and ice and madness in his eyes. “You should run,” he’d advised, smile fading to seriousness as he glanced behind him once more. Grantaire looked too, and felt his skepticism waver. “Or...” The man added, “you could come with me.”

It had been giddy and reckless and wild, it had defied all the reason in the world, but he had never felt so free when he’d taken that outstretched hand.

He had always, impossibly, trusted him.

His eyebrows knitted together and he bit his lip, uncertain of being able to shoulder the responsibility. “Do you trust _me_?”

The Doctor smiled and clasped his hand in answer. And then he tore his hand away, and screams of anguish soon wracked the air.

 

 

\--

Of course it would have been too much to hope for that the Doctor - _Enjolras_ \- could keep himself out of trouble. Where else would Grantaire have found the Doctor in nineteenth-century Paris, but protesting for the people’s sake? _Friends of the ABC_... The Doctor fits in far too well, down to the last terrible pun.

Grantaire doesn’t, so much. He probably wouldn’t, not even with a falsely-created backstory, with a ‘life’ here before 1832. It doesn’t really matter when this is, or where, the very fact they are fighting for the impossible is explanation enough.

He falls into the group surprisingly easily, despite the way his very skin squirms under the pretence of believing in it all. He doesn’t manage to pretend for long, but he has had vague familiarity and acceptance from Enjolras since finding them - they are students, acquaintances or somesuch - and all the others have grown to like him a startling amount despite his general uselessness. Their meeting-places, a cafe and a wine-shop most regularly, are flooded in warmth and conviviality; the haze of fluid friendships and free-flowing laughter do their best to mask the cutting graveness of the group’s objective.

They are readying themselves for revolution. Every day that passes is another spent rallying people to the cause, chafing at the bit under the severe reins of those in power. Every day sees the Doctor dig deeper and deeper into the raging heart of the time, and every step in that direction is just asking for disaster, and Grantaire knows it. He’s supposed to be keeping the Doctor away from any pivotal events that the students dream of, things that might alter history, extraordinary moments or movements that might alert their pursuers to their presence.

He spends plenty of time trying to dissuade them all, but he is finding he is failing.

The most he can ever do is interject and argue, hum some temporary friction into being, be the herald of distraction. Most of the men just laugh him off.

Enjolras’ patience is the shortest.

There had been enough residual awareness to let him in, just as promised.

Enough to let him in. _But not enough to actually like you, Grantaire_ , he ought to have warned.

 

 

 --

He doesn’t have a home, here. He’d passed through restaurants and cafes, boxing rings and fencing clubs, museums and libraries - half of Paris, really - in his initial search for the Doctor, but since then, he’s barely left Enjolras’ side. He is discreet, of course, and the group is together enough hours of the day that his presence is not especially noted.

This afternoon, they are giving speeches in the street. The crowds have formed a heavy cluster, and it is Enjolras who seizes their attention. Grantaire stands against a wall on the opposite side of the street, gazing at him from a distance.

He is so much the Doctor, though he doesn’t know it. He has all the Doctor’s passion, all that empathy that extends the nature of humankind, never mind the rest of the universe. He is strong and centred and absolute in his beliefs, with every ounce that knowing righteousness, the manner of a judge who might march in, hand in hand with the apocalypse. He has seen him at moments of such warmth, taking comfort from the goodness of the men around him,  but now he is bellowing fire, all a Timelord’s fury confined to a man. Enjolras’ voice is surging over the heads of the people and echoing in their fervent whispers, flowing in slow exhalations, summoning a shared sentiment in sudden rousing shouts.

Grantaire can’t bring himself to even blink. As long as he does not, he can fool himself, fool himself that it is the Doctor he sees, not a fleeting shadow on a cave wall, a pale imitation of the true form.

“ _Gavroche_ ,” someone reproaches nearby, pulling Grantaire reluctantly back to earth.

Not a minute later, a boy approaches him, dragging his feet in dramatic reluctance.

He holds out a small, grubby fist, tightly clenched.

Grantaire eyes it, extending his hand warily.

A glint of silver greets his gaze and his intake of breath is unusually sharp.

"Nice watch, mister," the boy says, his tone airy but his brown eyes strangely serious. Is there a touch of fear there? As the watch drops into his palm, he thinks he feels a flash of that same fear, too.

The child, street urchin - Gavroche? - scampers off as Grantaire gets nudged idly in his side.

“You’d better watch out,” Bahorel advises, his tone as casual as his stance, leant against the building wall. “Head in the clouds, making an easy target for these pickpockets.”

Before even the dust of that message settles, Grantaire raises his eyebrows at the shadow slinking around the corner. The same scruffy boy offers Grantaire’s companion a grin and a cocky wave of the pinched coin, before taking off at a lively pace.

"Oi, you," Bahorel intones boisterously. "Little rascal! Give that back!"

It is an amusing sight, watching the relative giant, burly and broad-shouldered, bound off down the street after the sandy-haired gamin, the two strangely matched in nimbleness of step.

Grantaire sinks back against the wall, his laughter at the chase fading as his heartbeat slows to its normal rate, the watch sitting precious in his pocket.

 

 

 --

It is evening, and Enjolras is talking about the future again.

“For all that is sacrificed in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century will be happy -”

“It won’t be,” Grantaire interjects, his dark undercurrent cutting in expertly whenever Enjolras is at his heights of pure naive idealism. He snorts. “It definitely won’t.”

Grantaire’s seen the twentieth century - and even if he hadn’t, he’s still from the future beyond it, so he’s obviously better placed to pass judgement on this - and happiness sounds a moronic contradiction to events like oh, two _world wars_ and _genocide_ , and that’s just for starters. The good might increase, certainly, but so will the bad. Society might as well be on a baggage carousel or terrible merry-go-round through history: every step forward - Grantaire won’t deny that there have been a few - or stumble backwards really means nothing at all, because everything is stuck going in circles anyway. Could you tell the difference between Ancient Rome and a civilisation from the 74th century? Hardly. Slavery, war, poverty, inequality; it is everywhere and always. (He’d say it’s human nature, only he’s seen the similarities on other planets and in other species, so... it’s just _nature_.)

“You’re right, it will never be, if everyone is simply too afraid or too _apathetic_ to act! What have indifference and idleness ever done for you, Grantaire?” Enjolras retorts, contempt in his glare. “If the world were full of people like you, what change would ever be accomplished?” He is near in danger of spitting on Grantaire’s forehead, one of his hands in angry collision with the surface of the table.

“For one thing, alcohol would be free,” He returns, ducking for the wine bottle before it can smash to the floor. It is a joke, and desires laughter. Only the faintest chuckling comes; it seems the others are, at least tonight, reluctant to invoke more of Enjolras’ wrath.

The Doctor would have laughed.

Enjolras narrows his eyes and deliberately ignores his presence for the rest of the evening.

Grantaire retreats to a corner. Whilst the others are deep in serious debate, Enjolras and Feuilly’s voices loud and harmonious, Jehan, Joly and Bossuet sneak back to him, evidently to estimate how well he is faring, how much damage has been done.

He thinks he does well to seem unperturbed.

“He is unusually choleric tonight,” Joly assures him, as though it can’t be helped or avoided, as though Grantaire does not knowingly provoke Enjolras.

Bossuet chuckles quietly at everything Grantaire says, pours them all more wine in an effort to remain good-humoured.

Jehan just sits in companionable silence, and Grantaire can’t tell whether the poet is listening to Enjolras or scrutinising him instead. Both, most likely.

“And I am disturbingly gloomy tonight.” He offers in fairness, trying not to sabotage everyone’s mood tonight. He shifts his chair slightly, avoids their prolonged stares by focusing on the sky outside.

“It’ll get easier,” they say.

“No, it won’t,” he answers, with a shrug. Enjolras’ ideals won’t be changed, and Grantaire won’t begin pretending he can’t see the flaws in them. It is the way they’ll always be, that much is clear, and Enjolras cannot even bear his company as the Doctor does. And with the task Grantaire has, trying to keep him out of trouble, he can only foresee things getting worse.

“Thank God I’m not staying.”

It is a cryptic statement and he knows it, but he ignores Joly and Bossuet’s confusion expertly, and Jehan’s expression is unfathomable, in any case.

He lets them begin to converse about inconsequential matters, his small half-smile the only indication of his paying attention.

A flash of light pierces the sky, drags him out of his melancholy reverie. It is green, searing through the grey and black, in a startling arc over the city. He follows it down, down, out of sight.

“Did you see that?” He exclaims abruptly, no thought spared to what he might be interrupting now.

“See what?”

“That green light. Did you see it? Out there?”

Bossuet looks amused, but gestures through the window lazily. “It’s cloudy. You can hardly make out a constellation, let alone a shooting star.”

Grantaire doesn’t refute the term _shooting star_ ; whilst he is miserable at holding his tongue, he does know better than to bring up _spaceships._

“It looked like it was landing. Across the Seine,” he muses.

“I don’t think shooting stars land like that, Grantaire,” Joly informs him.

“I saw it,” Grantaire repeats, making no effort to eliminate the serious tone from his words.

A different voice joins the fray.

“You’re drunk.” Enjolras says, disgusted.

“I may be,” Grantaire admits righteously, “but I still saw it.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Enjolras exchange disapproving looks with Combeferre and Courfeyrac. His closest friends seem to leave the task to him.

And the next moment, he barks, “Grantaire. If you have nothing else to contribute, perhaps you’d best go home for the evening.”

“Fine.” He stands, agreeing, too distracted to put up a proper fight.

Enjolras’ blue eyes mark his surprise at the unexpected surrender, his full lips parted in a breath intended to precede a gasp. He holds this back, just, pursing them instead and acknowledging the exit with an almost-apologetic nod.

Grantaire, for perhaps once in his life, doesn’t waste much energy noticing this.

He’ll need to be back in time to see that Enjolras gets home soundly - not that Enjolras is aware that this is Grantaire’s nightly ritual, but nonetheless - but he and the others will be debating for at least another hour.

He could loiter outside. But he could also use this opportunity to investigate.

He shrugs his coat on as he descends the stairs, fastening the buttons absently in his hurried walk, exiting into the street with a strange sense of purpose.

He doesn’t have the Doctor to help him here. It is all up to him.

 

 

\--

He can’t find the spaceship. He searches high and low, but there is no trace of a crash, no sign of a ship, no flash of that green light again. Perhaps he _is_ that drunk, hallucinating even without the help of absinthe tonight.  

There is time, still, to waste. His feet carry him to the TARDIS, hibernating in its hidden corner of the street.

His limbs are only a little shaky when he is standing in as close a thing he has to home, when he is sheltered in this secret ship, its heartbeat guiding his. He stumbles closer to the centre, fingers caressing the walls like a blind man, throat aching in a silent hello. It is as lonely as he is. Neglect swells over them both.

Nothing has changed in here. The TARDIS is a constant.

Grantaire turns on the message the Doctor had left for him. He hangs onto the words he recalls the Doctor saying in his head every day, because those instructions are the last threads of the only lifeline he has.

Instructions. He is trying his best, but following none of them well.

He dreads hearing the last of them again.

“And _you_. Don’t let me forget you.”

You.

The word can send a shiver wracking his core from head to toe, can sober him faster than a bucket of ice-cold water. It does, too, even when it is Enjolras who utters it. It shocks him, that electric current sparking the image of the Doctor, the Doctor thinking of him, _caring_. Enjolras is nearly always accusing him, employing the direct address as a call to combat or perhaps a rebuke, but that doesn’t matter, Grantaire doesn’t care. Because he remembers the way the Doctor says you, like he attaches importance to the word, and importance to the human being behind it.

It is ridiculous.

Of everyone - in the world, in the universe, in all of time - the Doctor could have held out his hand to, why had it been Grantaire?

“I don’t know,” he tells the TARDIS helplessly, fiercely swallowing the bitterness. “I don’t know what to do.”

 

 

 --

Four have already wandered across the path of the Family of Blood. A Father, a Mother, a Sister, a Brother.

A police inspector. A working woman. A little street girl. A National Guardsman.

They watch the door of a small blue box swing shut, watch a dark-haired man tuck the key strung around his neck back under his shirt, and watch where he goes the rest of the night.

They turn their heads and sniff the air.

 _The Doctor_ , they whisper. _The Doctor is here_.


	2. he dreams he's awake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I only have some final editing to do of part three, so the last chapter should be up by the end of the weekend - enjoy!

There is a sculpture of them together. Was, maybe. Grantaire has no idea whether the statue survived and wound up in the corner of a museum somewhere, a little speck of history, nameless and meaningless to everyone, or whether time was cruel to it, whether it crumbled as soon as they’d left it.  

It had been commissioned as a thank you, despite their protests. He never took a photo of it - he’d been hesitant to wander round Greece in the fifth century BC with a camera slung around his neck like a total tourist, to be honest - but he’s contemplated drawing it many a time. He hasn’t yet, but it is as eternal as anything can be already, etched in the back of his mind as though he were gazing at it right now.

He couldn’t recognise himself, his mop of black hair crystallised into purest marble, with, for once in his life, features that could be called _chiselled_. He’d laughed at it, mocking his serious pose, pretending to punch himself in the nose that was not nearly crooked enough. And then the Doctor had shattered his ease with one of _those_ comments - uncomfortably blunt, a little too certain, statements that stuck out like shards of glass in the sand - saying only, “But you always look like that.”

He’d scoffed, shifted the focus onto the reproduction of the Doctor at his side. It had been too hard to look at his statue-self, after that, a sentence that was so glaring a lie it almost hurt. But for all the disparity in his, the Doctor’s was breathtakingly accurate. His wild curls had become a lion’s mane, tossed back in a creamy cascade, his stance strong and his features fine, his expression treading a faint boundary between greatness and madness. The only thing that was missing were his eyes: those blue eyes that had seen all of time and space, worlds beyond worlds, wonders and devastation. Eyes that could show you the abyss.

It was beautiful and terrible in equal measure.

Grantaire could have stood there for all eternity.

Instead, he’d said something dumb to break the enthrallment, something like, “Apollo, eat your heart out.”

And then they’d had to run.

He’d gotten used to running.

 

 

 

\--

Hiding is a new twist, though.

He muses on his current situation altogether too much. It is hard not to, of course.

There are plenty of lonely hours to contend with, and he can’t pace around the TARDIS in all of them. He lingers in an alleyway beside a bar. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see a window, a few storeys up, of a building that overlooks this area. It is a secure place, not as extravagant as Enjolras could afford to rent had he any desire of his parents’ approval, but one that is not nearly as shabby as its neighbours. Grantaire knows which is Enjolras’ room, if only by the candle that burns late in the window, the flickering silhouette of a man who barely sleeps.

He loathes this arrangement, unbeknownst to everyone but him. He waits, and watches, and he drinks to pass the time, to settle his fears. It is a terrible idea: some kind of guardian angel he is, if he won’t even be sober to present assistance and protection when the time comes. It is cold, and it is lonely, and he doesn’t have the faintest idea what he would say if Enjolras were to accuse him of shadowing his every move, because it is true, and he wouldn’t believe the reason for it. It is too much responsibility, as well, and every night, at the end of each and every glass, he wonders what possessed the Doctor to trust him with this.  

The thought bores into him again. _Why Grantaire?_

The only conclusion he has ever been able to come to is that it is all a great mistake. An accident. A stroke of awful, wonderful chance.

He wishes fate were real. He wishes he could put it down to something that was meant to be, that the universe had aligned to give him the miraculous chance. If he believed in a god, he would thank that force every day for that twist of fate.

Even if there is nothing or no one to thank, Grantaire is thankful.

And he hates himself for it, too.

Because he is not _meant_ to be here, and he knows it. Anyone would be better for this than he. Anyone deserves this more than he does. The Doctor deserves someone better than him. He wishes life were fair.

Grantaire has nothing to contribute. Nothing to offer. Nothing to say. Of course it is an accident, because else the universe would have one sick sense of humour. _Show a man the world_ , it says, _show off every wonder and beauty and miracle to the man who cannot appreciate it, because he doesn’t believe in anything._

The Doctor hasn’t changed him, either. Not how he wishes he could. Grantaire is sure of this, because he has seen that expression in the Doctor’s eyes, always stemming from something Grantaire has said or done or unconsciously implied. Irritation or exasperation or sympathy or fondness that pools into something deeper and more profound and more disappointed. It makes Grantaire want to run. And he always does: he avoids that look, backs away from that challenge with confidence in all his cowardice. They are locked in that endless battle: disenchantment and disappointment. He’d wish the Doctor could just accept that; but then again he really doesn’t, because then he might have to face the end of their travels, and he knows he’s far too selfish and cowardly for that.

He hasn’t ever really thought about abandoning ship. He’s not wilful enough to even consider it seriously. Endangering his life, that never matters (his life isn’t worth a damn to start with). Finding a purpose, a permanence, that would be impossible (the limbo he lives in with the Doctor is a better escape than he could have dreamed of, too). Getting over the Doctor would be sensible (but Grantaire is in _far_ too deep for that).

He would never have the courage to leave.

It occurs to him, sometimes, that the Doctor has a past independent of him. He has a past independent of the Doctor, of course - twenty odd years of a dull life - but the Doctor has centuries, centuries and worlds beyond him.

So he knows the Doctor will never feel the same way about him.

Because he can’t imagine a life after the Doctor.

He can’t comprehend life without him.

Grantaire exhales in a sigh.

What if he had no choice? Barely a day passes without the possibility of losing him; what if it happened? What if it happened here? The watch might not work. There is always the chance that something could go wrong; Grantaire tends to pay attention to those possibilities, because if anything _can_ go wrong, it usually does. Worst case scenario, then. Here with Enjolras. No way back. No way forwards.

Could he be happy here, if he were stuck in nineteenth-century Paris with Enjolras for the rest of his short human life? He imagines himself, falling into a routine, bouncing between cafes and restaurants and boxing rings and dance halls and the wine shop, those temporary homes he has already claimed. But if he is here permanently, he’ll have to live somewhere. He’ll have to rent a real room, buy an apartment. How he is supposed to _buy_ anything - he has limited funds, and even the money he has found in the TARDIS, what if that was a one-off? - if the police box doesn’t usually function as a bank machine?

He could live here, in any case. He could get a job. As a waiter in a restaurant, selling books in a shabby second hand bookshop. Predicting events in the coming centuries to gasps and laughter, astounding people with his modern gadgets and strange clothes. He could lurk on street corners, beg for money. He could paint in the evenings.

It wouldn’t be very different here, to home. A lack of purpose only lessens the importance of place; what does it matter, where he is? He was never going anywhere, anyway. Home means nothing to him, it never has... Grantaire supposes his willingness to leave everything in an instant to travel who-knows-where with a stranger reflected that, even then. His friends have probably long forgotten him. He hasn’t visited his parents in what feels like years. He doesn’t want to, either. They want to hear from him just as much as he wants to return. By any and all accounts, he’s better off gone.

The Doctor is the only person Grantaire wouldn’t be willing to lose. If he does - if he has already, if he has unknowingly bid a last goodbye to the Doctor’s real consciousness - the future looms up, dark and cold.

His mind leaps to the next best thing before he can prevent it. _Yes_ , he thinks, he could spend the rest of his days here happily, his life set in orbit to a sun. He isn’t the _Doctor_ , but Grantaire is a little bit in love with the human version too. Enjolras is magnificent and real and sharp and passionate... and can’t stand Grantaire’s presence in the slightest.

It is also 1832. Homosexuality is not a topic to be spoken of. Romantic love hardly seems to have a place in the Doctor’s human life at all. Would Enjolras be satisfied, having a life with Grantaire?

No, Enjolras will be fighting for revolution as long as he lives.

So much for an idyllic future together.

Not that it even matters, when Grantaire knows he could survive simply on the memory of the moments Enjolras touches his life, however few and temporary and agonising they may be. He will settle for anything, as long as he has that to live for.

This is what hiding might become.

Grantaire clings to the thought of not having to exist without him, the thought of dying together. He knows, faced with the choice of fading away slowly, wearily, helplessly, or burning out like the magnificent collapse of a supernova, Enjolras - the Doctor - would choose the latter any day.

And Grantaire?

If it is a choice between hiding or running, lonely or together... Grantaire prefers running.

 

 

 

\--

The scent is scattered, lost on the wind. There is only the barest trace.

But they are here now, and they know better than to leave.

They stand sentry within the city. The Father patrols the streets. The Mother listens to hushed talk, the people’s plight. The Sister, the Daughter, she skips along in a society of her own, eyes on one particular boy. They all hear threat of revolution.

The Brother, the Son, he is busy forming an army.

“Soldiers!” He cries. The men, each garbed in identical uniform, turn to their peer in confusion and suspicion. “Stand to attention!”

No one listens.

The Son smiles. “You will serve -” He breaks an orb, unleashes tendrils of a strange green smoke that engulf the National Guard, one by one, “- the Family of Blood!”

“Attention!” He bellows again.

This time, they obey.

_Father of Mine, Mother of Mine_ , he calls telepathically. _Sister of Mine_.

His Family answers.

_Time to find ourselves a Timelord._

 

 

 

\--

Grantaire generally takes to scribbling on scraps of paper at the table whilst the students discuss their protests and politics and philosophies and progress, and it proves a small comfort. If this isolation is to be a never-ending state, he supposes he feels most sane when he can speak silently to himself, confess through a paper and pen... though sometimes he gets no further than scrawling a phrase or a place or a name.

Occasionally, the letters flower into drawings, the black ink pooling into sketches of monsters and aliens and the wonders of distant planets; perhaps the Paris of _his_ present; anything, everything. The others, when they spare Grantaire’s handiwork a glance, have grown to be amused by the nonsensical apparitions on the page, the meaningless scribbles, the strange peculiarities of it all. When called to, Grantaire fends them off with wild tales until they are shaking in laughter and all admirers of his wit. Oftentimes, he laughs along, if only because they cannot comprehend his seriousness. He never mentions Enjolras, of course. He draws him, though, in the privacy of darklit bars and alleys and benches, with only the street’s bickering lamplight and moonlight to accompany him through the small hours of the night. He has little else to hold onto. The Doctor seeps into every page.

Jean Prouvaire, who finds him perched by the Seine one day, shuffles through the stacks of parchment held beneath a grey pebble before Grantaire can stop him, and questions him with quiet eyes. Enjolras stares off the paper, Enjolras in face and figure, the Doctor in the rest, a mesmerising madness in his gaze. Young and old, ancient and forever. Ice and fire and rage. Burning as brightly as the heart of the sun, with all the force of a terrible storm. “ _Apollo_ ,” he confesses swiftly, embellishing the art with the name of a god. He tells Jehan to take it or tear it up, whichever he desires, because he doesn’t want it. The poet pauses, considers, but slips the drawing back into the pile with the softest, most subdued smile. Grantaire waits until he goes, but even then, he can’t bring himself to throw that drawing away.  

Tonight, Grantaire has not yet committed to more than a few swirls and scratches, his other hand dancing around a glass, his interest waxing and waning with the topics of debate. Enjolras has been yawning unwittingly; someone chimes in to remark that their chief has earned the sleep.  

Enjolras protests with a simple shake of the head, and tries to let conversation spark again.

The others kindly insist that if he is half as tired as they - though it is evident he is doubly so - that he really must get some rest.

“With such exhausting dreams, sleep becomes a fruitless endeavour.” His tone is light, the comment throwaway, but Grantaire is instantly riveted. He need not speak, though, for Courfeyrac has leapt in with prompts of his own. “Exhausting, why? What is it you have dreamt of?”

Enjolras appears, once again, tempted to refer them all back to their discussions of justice over mercy, of freedom and equality, power and corruption, but it is far too late, and the atmosphere is already growing warm and comforting in idleness. So he indulges them with a rare smile, offering a shrug of his shoulders. “I do not suppose dreams ought to make sense,” he warns, a sternness crossing his face as though anticipating rife theorising the moment he pauses for breath. “But I find myself in strange places and unfamiliar times. I am different too, I am - a madman.”

“ _Different_ , you say?" Courfeyrac interjects, with an easy laugh. "You’re already a madman, Enjolras."

Enjolras pretends not to hear that. “A madman from another world. I once watched the pyramids of Egypt being built. I feel as though I have seen far into the future. So many different cities, unfamiliar lands... Sometimes the sky is orange, or the earth made of diamonds. Armies of strange creatures, too, shining steel... and always a flying box, the mysterious blue box.”

Grantaire, hanging on every word, draws the ink closer in haste. Furtively, he sketches, forming Cybermen and Daleks, trying not to allow the nonchalant smirk to drift from his face, nor to draw attention to himself. The TARDIS materialises in a few swift lines, the ink smudging into panels of wood.

And still, his movements give the group ideas.

“Then you’ve been looking at Grantaire’s pictures! They have stolen into your subconscious,” Bahorel roars, good-naturedly. Courfeyrac collapses, chuckling again.

Joly looks relieved there is an explanation that does not involve a dreadful malady, of which feverish hallucinations may be a symptom. Bossuet shakes his head.

Enjolras wanders towards Grantaire in measured interest. Grantaire can feel his heart throbbing dangerously. Enjolras does not pay much heed to him beside disparaging his cynical interjections, so Bahorel’s theory is flawed, for the leader doesn’t usually pore over the time-traveller’s illustrations like the rest. And Grantaire knows his musings do not compare to the true memories... but if Enjolras sees - will he _remember_ -

He feels breath over his shoulder. His catches in his chest.

Enjolras’ lips part. “That is -”

"Nothing, naturally," Grantaire says.

“Uncanny.” It is only a mutter, a thought expelled almost unconsciously, too quiet for the world to hear.

“I suppose they must have,” He tells the group, louder then, letting it linger as a dismissal.

Chairs scrape against the wooden floor, voices swelling in _au revoir_ and _bon nuit_.

But Enjolras has made no move to leave, and his smile has set into a frown, brows heavy above deep-set, long-lashed eyes. Grantaire sees the look of consternation that says, _can you explain this to me?_

_I could_ , Grantaire thinks. But he cannot. He will not. It is safer not to.The Doctor’s security: that is the whole cause of this mess. Grantaire is not allowed to let him realise, not allowed to convince him of the truth.

And he doubts Enjolras would believe him if he tried.

“I drew from your descriptions,” He remains offhand, screwing the cap onto the inkbottle as he speaks.

Enjolras looks unconvinced, draws the papers nearer. Scrutinises the shading of a Slitheen.

“What is that?”

“Have you never had nightmares as a child? That is purely a monster. I assure you I made it up.”

Their chief eyes it a moment more, then gives a quiet ‘hmmph’. He doesn’t seem quite sure.

But then he points at the TARDIS. “That, though. I have dreamt of that.”

“We dream of the same things, then,” Grantaire says, making it a joke. Dreaming of the same things as a drunkard, won’t Enjolras be proud of that? “We must have an extraordinary connection.”

There is silence, devoid of a denial.

“The blue box. What does it say here?” Enjolras squints. “‘Police Box’. What is that? I have never heard of such a thing.”

Grantaire shrugs. “An invention, that is all.”

“But it can’t be! I have seen it, in my dreams.” His voice is rising, fierceness spilling eagerly from him. “There is something you aren’t telling me, Grantaire.”

_If only he could know._

“I know nothing, Enjolras. Don’t listen to me.”

The blond purses his lips.

There is a hand on Grantaire’s shoulder. The touch is gentle, surprisingly so, but Grantaire is burning beneath Enjolras’ palm. He exhales, fighting a shiver that trickles down his spine.

The fingers slide softly from his shoulder, fall to the leader’s side.

“Goodnight, Grantaire.”

 

 

 

\--

If Enjolras is dissatisfied without answers about the dreams that plague him, he doesn’t mention them again. The others question him upon occasion, intrigued by exploits in his dreams: when he admits having _two hearts_ , Joly does the honours of checking for such a malady, only half in jest.

While Enjolras throws himself into his cause as fervently as ever, Grantaire is growing restless in different way.

Perhaps he _should_ tell Enjolras, before the Doctor’s years are wasted by the end of a false human life. All this talk of revolution that he has done scarcely anything to really quell...

After an evening during which he has barely spoken, everyone has filtered out before him, and he knows he should get up and be sure that Enjolras is still safe from the threat that has, as yet, refrained from presenting itself at all.

He hasn’t time to force himself into motion before someone re-enters the room. For half a second, he imagines it might be Enjolras -

“Grantaire, are you quite well?”

It is Combeferre.

“Of course,” he claims, with an impassive shrug. Combeferre is not discouraged from pulling up a chair. Grantaire would feel bad to flee, but he resists the temptation to speak, as well.

So they sit in amiable silence. Combeferre has taken out a book, but he does not appear to be reading it.

After a while - he doesn’t know what it is that makes him - Grantaire pipes up.

"Where is Enjolras from?"

If Combeferre is surprised, he doesn’t show it. "From the south, like most of us."

"What were his parents like?"

Combeferre pauses. "He doesn't speak much of his family," He says, in a tone of considered agreement, as though understanding of Grantaire's curiosity.

"They were wealthy. Kind without being loving. Firm without being cruel. He was taught well as a boy - too well. He has always been too clever for his own good.” The gleam in Combeferre’s eye, so knowingly pointed, makes Grantaire wonder whether that is an accusation also directed at him. (If it is, it is ridiculous. Combeferre, calling anyone else clever!)

“He left them behind when he came to Paris, though. He gave himself up for the Republic. Anything else hardly requires saying, though. After all, you know him better than anyone.”

“Do I?” Grantaire stutters. “You know Enjolras as well as I do.”

“I’ve known him longer, perhaps, yes,” Combeferre grants. _Not quite_ , Grantaire muses, _not really._ “But you seem to understand him better than he understands himself.”

Grantaire chokes back the sudden lump in his throat. _That’s because he’s not himself_ , he wants to blurt out, _he doesn’t know who he is_. He succeeds in a second more of silence, but Combeferre looks concerned by the anguish that is creeping into his shaking hands and pained expression.

“Perhaps that’s because my eyes are open. He is blind.”

Though already allowing himself to blurt out nonsensical sentiments, to _wallow_ , he is careful not to elaborate. If only he could pull himself together. Being blind to reality would make this life so much simpler, but it is not a luxury afforded to them both.

“Your cynicism speaking?” Combeferre remarks, but then he looks thoughtful. “Enjolras is blind to all but the cause, that much is true.”

“He cannot see the trees for the forest,” Grantaire explains; it is a near lament. A corner of his mouth quirks abruptly. “Perhaps he needs two hearts for that.”

Combeferre inclines his head at such an idea. Grantaire cocks the neck of the bottle towards his companion’s empty glass, as though he might share the drowning of his sorrows.

He tries to keep his thoughts to himself for the rest of the night.

 

 

 

 --

“Enjolras -” He begins, a halfhearted call.

The leader has already turned his head. He lets the door fall closed, his footsteps framing its slam. He is at Grantaire’s side.

Grantaire stands. “I -” Words are failing him.

He hasn’t been this close in a long time. He can almost fool himself it is the Doctor he sees.

“Enjolras, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Don’t I?” The man says, so knowingly, and for a split-second Grantaire believes the Doctor is awake in him.

“No.” He stares hopelessly at the ceiling, given up on finding an answer. “How could you be convinced otherwise?”

“I will not be swayed, Grantaire.” Enjolras is unmoving.

The worst thing is, the Doctor is just as much a stubborn ass. He is unshakeable.

Grantaire wants to slam his head into a wall.

“But you’re just a man.” Just human. “You’ll die.”

Enjolras just nods.

Of course he is prepared to. “You’re willing to die?”

Of course Grantaire is the one grimacing.

If only he were able to forbid him to die.

But he can’t stop Enjolras, and nothing he could say would convince him.

“I am, and I must. The Republic will not be made for my sake, but for the people’s. There will be no place there for those whose spill blood, so I may shed my own.”

But he doesn’t know what he’s throwing away. Things that can’t be thrown away. It might simply be France at stake for Enjolras, but Grantaire has the impending universe strung around his neck, beside the watch in his breast pocket. The universe needs the Doctor. And so does he.

“I can’t let you.” He blurts out, before he can stop himself.

“I’m afraid you cannot prevent me.” All of a sudden, Enjolras burns icy.

“You don’t understand,” Grantaire forces out through gritted teeth. “Your death won’t help anyone. It will mean nothing. It will all be a lie.”

He is angering Enjolras, but he can deal with that. It reminds him of the Doctor.

The Time Lord himself is balanced, but only just. His gallant nature and terrible greatness match the awful magnitude of his existence; he is the last of his kind, an angel with all of time and space to wander. He has seen the void and the abyss, and now those look out of him.

Enjolras is but a superficial imitation, a mere shadow. But when he is angry... Enjolras reminds him of those flashes he sees in the Doctor sometimes, that darkness that consumes him from the inside, the darkness of those memories, of what he has done.

The magnificence isn’t quite comparable. Because he is constrained: not only to Earth, but to a single city, to a single body. He is too much for it. He is too much for himself, for this human vessel he inhabits. The Doctor; cramped, confined, limited.

“You have no idea!” He cries. _You were supposed to blend in._

And how much longer can it last? Grantaire’s pleading doesn’t change anything. The Doctor is supposed to be hiding, but of course as a human he is ready to throw his life away. A martyr. His own goodness will undo him.

_The Doctor trusted me to stop him._

Grantaire is certain that if the watch were a watch, it would be ticking furiously, each second closer to Enjolras’ last. Can he really risk Enjolras’ death?

“I should tell you...” he mutters, hands closing around the watch.

Enjolras is already halfway gone.

Torn in his indecision, Grantaire clicks the watch open and snaps it straight shut again.

He bitterly resolves to delay the revolution with everything he can muster, and protect the Doctor with his life. Better than taking their chances against the Family.

“You’re just a man, Enjolras.” He begs, reminding the empty room.

If only he wasn’t.


	3. remember me

Not a week later comes the word.

Lamarque is dead.

Enjolras is suddenly faced with a chance to seize, a time to strike.

Grantaire has run out of ways to stop him.

_Les Amis de l’ABC_ are ready.

There is barely a break in the frantic flurry of action and preparation. Scarcely a second to breath, let alone break it to Enjolras. The insurgents plan to defend themselves on a barricade, barricades in the streets of their city.

Grantaire knows it won’t turn out well. He isn’t certain what their chances will be when the Doctor is revealed to the Family, but if death is certain for Enjolras otherwise, he has concluded the risk is worth taking.

Enjolras has been avoiding him. Perhaps it is unintentional, but and no one but Grantaire seems to suspect otherwise. Grantaire is often waylaid as well, though, roped into gathering furniture, wiping down weapons, getting out of the way at a moment’s notice, another cog in the machine of revolution, but he knows his time is running out, and he has to find a way to stop this.

Finally, he sees a flash of that golden hair and distinctive crimson jacket in the upstairs window from his vantage point in the street, and scrambles up the stairs of the wine shop in his hurry to detain Enjolras, in case this is his only chance. He dashes towards the leader of the ABC, who is facing a street urchin with folded arms.

Grantaire recognises Gavroche. The two are wading deep in conversation.

“Until every man has a weapon, we cannot think of arming children.” Enjolras is saying, shaking his head.

The boy protests. “I seen it, though. Not just all you against the National Guard. I’m fightin’ as well. Ya need me.”

“No.” Enjolras says definitively. “We need more cartridges, more ammunition. _You_ need to stay safe.”

Grantaire barges over. “No,” he interjects, staring at Enjolras, “You need to stay safe.”

Enjolras is glaring daggers and Gavroche must slink away in defeat, because he feels the boy brush past him, but all he can do is continue to stare at the man who is so much more than he thinks he is and wonder how he is going to explain this.

Enjolras has his own ideas, and they are curt. “You need to leave the barricade, Grantaire. If you are not a part of this, you ought to go.”

Perhaps there aren’t the words.

“I can’t. Even if I wanted to - you’re the reason I’m here. I’m part of this because of you.”

He can’t tell whether Enjolras is dismayed or thunderstruck. “I fail to see -”

“Don’t tell me what it is you fail to see. I know what it is you don’t understand, you don’t know any of it -” He pauses and suddenly all the pent-up fear and frustrations leak out. “You don’t know how difficult it is to listen to the speeches you make. Everything you fight for, all those statements and sentiments that you make people believe... you know, it _hurts_. Because you’re wrong. _In the future no man will slay his fellow_ , you say. _The earth will be radiant_.”  

Enjolras is as swift to counter him as ever. “And it will. I cannot force you to believe it, but you cannot blame me for your own lack of vision, your incapability of belief.”

“Actually, I think I _can_.” Grantaire blasts out, imagining he is opposite the Doctor in this conversation. It may not have been a conscious thought, but it is something he could accuse the time traveller of, and his blind rage has unlocked that caged bitterness.

By the Doctor’s hand, he’s seen too much of the universe, and not enough good. All that seems splendid has a rotten core, and every happiness is marked by loss and peril to outweigh it, as if that is the universe’s only law. It is easy to understand how the wonders of worlds far and near pale against the slavery and injustice they were built upon; how grandeur is merely decadence and avarice; how poverty and misery spread as swiftly as disease, with no hope for a cure; how readily evil might conquer good. How the past and the future alike are no better than the present.

“Because it doesn’t get better!” He bellows, face contorted with frustration. “I know it, and I know you know it,” - which example to use first? They’ve seen it all - “There’ll always be fear and hate, war and destruction, in a hundred years or five million.”

The man opposite him has shrunk into Enjolras once more, and it nearly makes him feel guilty for attacking Enjolras’ naivety, the one thing that renders him so hopeful and selfless and great; Grantaire surveys him as the man’s indignant confusion swells. “You - but how could you know anything about -”

“The future? Don’t believe me then, but I know about the future. And the human race never changes.” Grantaire heaves a breath, suddenly stricken by the weight of it all. How can he be expected to hold this in any longer? “The universe never changes.”

How could the Doctor leave this responsibility in his hands?

“Especially not if you’re dead.” He murmurs.

“What do you mean by that, by any of this?” Enjolras retorts sharply, more disconcerted than he has ever been.

A universe without the Doctor. It is one thing to recall the terror and devastation they have witnessed across time and space, but it is utterly another not to realise how much worse the universe would be without him.

Soon it will be too late for an explanation.

“You can’t die. You’re too important to the universe.”

_This is no time for nonsense_ , Enjolras’ bewildered expression intones. He opens his mouth, but Grantaire raises a hand. “I’m not finished. Please, just listen to me for once. Listen, and believe me.”

The silence is a blessing. “There are - people - after you, people who want to kill you. No, I’m not talking about soldiers -” Grantaire says, the words crashing out on a tide of contradiction, of anxiety and relief, “- and I’m not talking about the revolution, I mean they’re coming for _you_.”

“For me?”

“ _Yes_.”

Enjolras’ mind is utterly unfathomable. “Why?”

“It’s difficult to explain. They know who you are - you don’t, but they do - and everyone else is in danger because you’re here.” Grantaire expels fiercely, knowing it sounds feeble. “Come with me, we can leave together. Leave now, and we can save everyone.” The first sentence alone holds not the scarcest appeal to anyone save Grantaire; but though Enjolras differs from the Doctor, they are alike enough that the second is all he needs to be convinced. Even in his humanity, he is a hero. “It’s the only way. Believe me.” He repeats.

But that’s not the way it works. Enjolras has bigger and better things to believe in. He has no reason to trust Grantaire, even after all the faith Grantaire has put in him and the Doctor.

“Give me an explanation.”

“I know revolution means the world to you, but you care about your friends, don’t you?” Grantaire prompts impatiently. “Come with me and let them be safe first, and then you can have your explanation.”

“Of course I care for them.” Enjolras’ tone is a solemn, ferocious hymn. “But I cannot abandon them now, no matter what you say.”

Grantaire hates himself, hates the thought, but it is something the Doctor knows much better than he, and he knows in his heart it is true. Enjolras should understand. “Sometimes you have to make sacrifices. Sometimes there’s a greater good. The future is dependent on you.”

“ _Tell me_.” Enjolras is shaking his head, but he grasps Grantaire by the arm. His words are an order. “How have you seen the future? _Who am I?_ ”

Grantaire tells him. “You’re the Doctor.”

There is no time for endless stories, but he says what he must, searching for some spark of recognition in those blue, blue eyes. He continues, and finishes with “... we’ve seen it all, we’ve been everywhere. You’ve seen terrible things, too. You’ve _done_ terrible things. You’ve had to. You don’t even talk about it, but you’re the last of your kind. Last of the Timelords. You wander the universe - you’re impossible - you -”  

Enjolras says nothing.

“Your past here is just a facade; none of it ever happened. The dreams, they’re what’s real - you know it makes sense, you must see the truth... How else would I know about all this?”

“If I am the Doctor, who does that make you?”

Grantaire tries to not flinch. He should have seen it coming. “I -” he stutters. “You don’t remember - not even in dreams - you don’t know - _anything_?”

“You are familiar.” There is perhaps a flicker of pity, but Enjolras - the Doctor just as much - has never been one to lie to soften a blow. No. He has nothing more to add. Grantaire is simply _familiar_.

“I’m the Doctor’s... companion,” He answers lamely.

“What does that entail?” Enjolras’ brows are creased, his tone demanding.

Grantaire swallows.

Assistant? Friend? Hopeless admirer? Irksome company? There is little difference in what he has been to Enjolras. There aren’t words to describe the life they lead, only that it is _theirs_ , both of theirs. They revel in existence and experience the universe. Together.

“I don’t know. We travel together. You save the world -”

“And you - you stand by and watch?”

Grantaire wants to point out all that he’s done that has been useful, clever, courageous, _inspired_ , even; all the times he’s saved both their skins, the times a little improvisation was required. The times he’s gotten them out of trouble singlehandedly, the times he’s proved himself something slightly more than worthless.

But he doesn’t point that out. Because he can’t keep fooling himself. He’s useless. He’s ordinary beyond all bounds, he’s an utter failure, he’s the lowest of the low. How he came to ever qualify as _company_ and not simply as an unwanted pest is incomprehensible. The Doctor pitied him, he supposes, and still pities him. So he has clung to this greater existence like a lifeline. He is a mortal beside a god, a speck of dust on the heart of time.

“I’m along for the ride,” He snaps, his chest aching, stomach twisting in unnatural knots. “I’m always just _there_ , there for the hell of it, because I have nowhere else to be. If you changed back, you’d be able to ask yourself _why_ you ever let me come along.”

“Don’t believe me, then.” He adds.

Enjolras has not lessened in graveness. “I am almost inclined to believe you now, for that description paints such a familiar design. It sounds so much like you. Always here, though you have nowhere else to be, simply here for the company.”

“Well, I wonder why that might be.” Grantaire hisses, his fists suddenly clenched. “Who do you think sent me here, two hundred years from home? Who trusted me to guard him while he was in danger, and utterly oblivious to it?”

How could the Doctor ever have thought him capable?

“I would not know. For I cannot be your Doctor, and if you have nothing else there is nothing to hold you here. Perhaps you ought to leave.”

He isn’t the Doctor, he certainly isn’t _his_ Doctor. Perhaps it is time to resign himself to a lost cause, as he usually does. Give up. Await the end. He is too angry, too tired of this. So Grantaire turns and goes.

But before the door has completed its arc of swinging shut, he jerks his head over his shoulder, fixes Enjolras with a damning stare.

“You’d sacrifice yourself for the future of France. You wouldn’t do it for the universe?”

\--

Nothing he has said has made the slightest difference, because Enjolras leads the people to the funeral. They march into the streets. Retreat to the barricades they have organised. Just for a second, Grantaire admires it. The Doctor does not condone violence - and with what he is already haunted by, he never would - but if this is a war, it is a noble cause. They are all prepared to die for it. It isn’t a bad time and place to die, he supposes. Human through and through.

\--

But perhaps their enemies are not so human.

The soldiers are upon them now.

They do not respond to cries of revolution. They do not speak at all. They do not distinguish between citizens and insurgents, just angle their weapons impassively. They have not shot yet - they have not tried to pass the barricade - but they stand and stare with a dull blankness, and then someone steps forwards.

People whisper furiously from behind the barricade, squinting over, clammy hands clenched around rifles and bayonets and swords, the whole world hanging by a single thread of suspense.

“Oh, _Doctor_!” The National Guardsman cries, jeering. “Look what we’ve found!”

For a moment, Grantaire thinks they are about to wheel out another cannon, but he sees a shade of blue instead.

“The TARDIS,” Grantaire whispers to himself, just before they declare the same thing to the barricade. He can almost feel the gazes on him, all in the same moment of realisation that they have seen that box in drawings before. He doesn’t look for Enjolras among them. He doesn’t look away from the TARDIS. Their last hope of getting out of here alive, and it is in the hands of The Family of Blood. They appear as human as the Doctor, but they, unlike him, seem to have all their wits about them.

“Come and get it, Doctor.” There is a woman standing amidst the soldiers, and her voice carries in a cackle. The man by her side - a police inspector some recognise, which causes a frantic wave of fear among the insurgents  - joins her in front of the doors of the police box, and he shouts, “Come on, Timelord. Give yourself up and you can save these humans. We only need you!”

Silence swells into confused muttering, murmuring that soon vanishes beneath the melody of a voice cast from the top of the barricade, a red jacket emblazoned next to a crimson flag against the sky.

Grantaire stops breathing.

“I am the Doctor.” Enjolras stands tall, unmoving.

The Family of Blood exchange looks. They turn their heads and sniff the air.

“You are no Doctor. He is nothing but a human.” The Sister says.

“A human, defending his people.” The guardsman sneers. “A human with more courage than the cowardly Doctor. Come out, Doctor, wherever you are! Come out and save them.”

Enjolras’ eyes are wide, uncomprehending. He tries to protest, but the soldiers threaten to fire.

The Family continue. “Or you can hide while all your friends die for you. We’ll find you soon enough.”

Grantaire nearly collides with Enjolras as he climbs off the barricade.

“I tried,” Enjolras hisses, sounding less calm than Grantaire has ever heard. “They think I’m human -”

“You are, still. You shouldn’t have -”

“How do I turn back?” Enjolras is asking, his breathing laboured. “How do I become the Doctor?”

Grantaire unconsciously clings to one of Enjolras’ wrists as he reaches in his pocket with his other hand. He is having trouble enough remaining upright, let alone believing that this is happening, right here, right now.

“Just open the watch.”

“The watch? What -?”

“You’ve got to open it. You understand?”

Enjolras nods expectantly. “Where is it?”

“I’ve got it - it’s -”

An empty pocket.

His other pockets are equally empty.

His fingers scrape at fabric and air again and again in disbelieving repetition.

“Gone.”

He releases Enjolras’ wrist, feels like slumping to the ground. He’s lost the watch. The Doctor trusted him with just one thing, and he’s lost the watch the moment it is needed.

Everyone is going to die because of him.

“Well, where is it?” Enjolras asks, and this time he isn’t demanding. He is worried.

“I don’t know.” He hears himself whisper.

“I’ll find it.” He hears himself say.

\--

Grantaire has barely begun to search, scarcely begun to scour the ground and halt people in their paths with wild hopes that they will have seen it, before the Family of Blood’s patience wears thin.

Their soldiers are shot at, but bullets do no lasting effect. The soldiers may as well be already dead.

They cannot be stopped. This does not stop men trying.

Abandoning their simple siege, and trying a new tactic, the Family begin to take hostages. They kill them one by one in the hopes of drawing the Doctor out.

Jean Prouvaire is one of the first to die.

\--

The vultures have been circling for an age, but panic now begins to feast on the barricade. Enjolras finds him once more, his eyes blazing beneath welling moisture. Tears keep blinding Grantaire, streaming out as he looks hopefully for a lost watch amidst an ocean of debris. His search has been to no avail.  

He doesn’t need to voice the outcome; it is quite clear.

Enjolras has more resolve than he.

“Watch or no watch, we’ve got to fight.”

“You could run,” he suggests. “Escape, with everyone.” There is no sense in them staging a revolution, when revolution is no longer what this battle is about. They are surrounded, though, and there is no saying the Family won’t tear down all of Paris in their hunt, but -

“Better to defend France and avenge our friends. The others agree.”

Grantaire nods numbly. Just this once, they see eye to eye: they both know they have no chance.

There must be something he can say, he thinks, if this is the last time he sees Enjolras, but his head is useless and his throat is dry. He can barely croak goodbye.

And so they fight. Grantaire keeps imagining glints of silver, a savior come from the heavens. Naturally, no watch appears.

Gunshots throw off his balance as they erupt in his ears, blow his brains out from their pure force.

Enjolras tries to hold off the approaching army, but it is a losing battle, and they are losing swiftly.

A cannon goes off, and Grantaire dives away from the explosion. His head slams into something jagged, and everything goes black.

\--

He blinks, slow and laboured. Failure leers at him from every angle. The stench of powerlessness engulfs him, misery seeping from his pores. Ever unsatisfied, death is hungry for more, circling towards him, skulking from the scattered corpses and seeping blood that surround him.

His life means little, whether it is ending or not. It has never meant much, not when he is alone. Grantaire’s thoughts are on other lives instead, the lives of all these men, of his friends, and of the Doctor. Lives that count. He knows he cannot save them all; he cannot divine how many of them are doomed. But they are still in his hands. This is still his fault.

Perhaps he won’t save any of them.

He won’t, like this. He won’t, unless he finds the watch.

_Try. Die trying._ The choice is made before he squeezes his eyes closed to think again. Without the watch, he is no help; he doesn’t know what he’s doing, any more than they do. He’d reason with the aliens, but they are beyond reasoning, and they have no uses for humans, he’s seen that well enough.

The insurgents may be able to hold off for a little longer.

If they don’t, and even if they do, this is the end -

His chest throbs as he thrusts his limbs into action once more. The watch.

“Grantaire, get down!” Someone - Combeferre, he thinks - roars, and it is lucky he stumbles so soon. Losing his footing leaves him crashing into a doorless cabinet, entrenched in the mass of wood of the barricade. Smoke blasts above him like volcano’s ash. He breathes into the shoulder of his shirt. The once-white is now torn, mangled brown, streaked with sweat and dirt and blood.

He hears calling, cries of “Enjolras!”, crescendoing shouts and screams and gut-wrenching pleas all tearing the world. They’re no older than Grantaire, and he watches them turn to their blazing leader in their final hopes. Bitter cynicism bubbles in him with the bile in his throat: as if there is anything _Enjolras_ can do.

He retches.

How many times has Grantaire shouted for the Doctor, in the same way? How often has he heard people they meet turn to the stranger, their faith and trust and hope bound to him and his brilliance beyond all else? How much of the Doctor’s endless life has been measured in cries of “ _Doctor!_ ”, his name a parting prayer in the gasping breaths of the innocent and the helpless, or a shriek in their throats that rips out with the unceremonious end of their lives? How often can he help them? Do the voices whisper and echo around him as the centuries pass, each a reminder of what he could and could not do? How can he bear it? How could anyone?

His own cry would be futile, so Grantaire forces it down.

When he tries to get up again, he falls over a body slumped on the barricade. _Gavroche_.

Gavroche, who was made to leave the barricade. Gavroche, the little ruffian from the streets, who never listened. Who was determined to fight. Who came back anyway.

A soldier looms up over this section of the barricade, more sure to follow. The soldiers can’t be killed, but that doesn’t stop Grantaire flinching instinctively, empty-handed. If he had a weapon to slow them down, at least, to give himself just a few more seconds on the clock, before time runs out...

His groping hand curls around a gun, but it isn’t loaded. He has not one cartridge in his pocket. No one at the barricade had had enough, though, but perhaps... With the barest of winces, he slumps over the poor boy’s body, forcibly relaxes, prays that he can pass as dead for long enough. Underneath the weight of his own chest, Grantaire instructs his fingers to crawl forwards, find the lining of the boy’s pocket, holds his breath against the coldness of the corpse. The pocket isn’t empty - his fingertips touch something cold - he finds a cartridge - begins to draw it out. It clinks against something, something that differs in shape. His sharp gasp is only disguised by a nearby gunshot, but the soldiers are storming past him over the barricade already, and if he doesn’t move now, he’ll be trampled.

Biting down on his lips in concentration, the circular fob slides neatly into the palm of his hand. He knows this is the one. This is the watch. The relief crashing over him makes Grantaire feel whole again.

Wrenching his gaze from Gavroche’s body, he scrambles up, scrabbling against wood and dust and flesh and slick blood as he tries to regain his footing.

And then he runs.

He catches sight of someone, and then he is tearing after Joly, the soldiers swarming behind them.

For a split-second, he sees Feuilly, but he disappears in a sea of bodies. He thinks he hears Bahorel shout, but all he can focus on are his pounding feet and throbbing heart.

Where’s Enjolras?

They take down Joly and Bossuet in the same breath. Grantaire keeps running. It takes everything he has.

_What about Enjolras?_

He nearly stops at Courfeyrac and Combeferre, bodies still crumpling against the wall, side by side, their eyes still open. In that moment, he thinks he prays.  

Can a Timelord return with no body to come back to? All hope might already be lost.

But if Enjolras is dead, he can give up the watch with the Timelord’s energy within to save whoever is still alive on the barricade, in the hopes that the Family of Blood will end this destruction when they have what they want. It will have come much too late, and Grantaire will have nothing left, but he can see no other course of action. Unless there is a way to destroy the watch. Then perhaps the fight will be over and no one will win.

He reaches the top floor, oblivious to everything.

But he has found the Family of Blood. They have their backs to him as they speak, but Grantaire utterly ignores them, just gazes at the lone figure, illuminated against the light.

Enjolras is the only one left.

There is a moment. A moment, and Grantaire can feel the blue eyes trained on him from across the room, blue eyes shining with something like surprise.

The Family notice him then, four heads with their uncanny tilt, bemused by his appearance.

“Kill us both, if you like!” He declares, his mouth set in firm defiance. “You won’t get what you came for.”

The aliens nearly seem amused, their guns trained on the two of them triumphantly. “Oh, but we will. Once you’re dead, we’ll sniff out the Time Lord’s essence soon enough,” the Brother exclaims. “With no one left to protect it, and with no body to come back to... well, we’ve already won the war.”

As they laugh, Grantaire staggers to Enjolras. There is one thing left to be done.

“Do you permit it?” He asks, his palm cold and clammy.

Enjolras clasps his hand with a smile.

The watch passes hands.

 

There is a single click before any shots are fired.

The beam that erupts from that circle of silver is searingly bright, a golden light tinged with fire and magnificence, enveloping the room and sending Grantaire sprawling. There is a sound that fills the air like singing or screaming but isn’t quite either, and his eardrums are bursting from it. It feels like Paris is shaking around them and the earth is spinning off its axis and life is ending and there is nothing he can do but close his eyes to the painful gloriousness and cling to the feel of the wooden floor against his cheek with all he has left.

All at once, it is quiet and as still as if time has stopped. Maybe this is death. The first thing he feels is his body against the floor again, and he slowly edges an eye open. Perhaps he is expecting only blackness after that explosion of light, but there is a tickling warmth, soft sunlight drifting through the broken glass of the window, clinging to motes of dust in the air.

The Family of Blood, all four in their mismatched human forms, have been reduced to cowering figures, writhing in some kind of agony. Their alien guns have been strewn across the floor, but Grantaire watches as fingers grasp at one of them.

When the Brother advances again with a raging howl, The Doctor is already aiming his sonic screwdriver cheerfully. “Horribly easy to disarm,” he remarks in surprise, peering at the weapon as the blue light extinguishes the opposing green before there is a chance to shoot. He concentrates the screwdriver again, holding the watch in his other hand. “And I’m afraid you won’t be going anywhere just yet. Because I’ve magnetised this watch here to attract alien life forms - and without bodies to possess, well, you’ll be trapped inside. If it can fit a Timelord, it can fit a Family.”

\--

The soldiers freed from alien compulsion; the Family of Blood’s spaceship destroyed; the Family serving the sentence of eternal life just as they’d wished, albeit not in the manner they’d expected: everything seems _easy_ now the Doctor is the Doctor again.

Grantaire has never felt such overwhelming relief.

That feeling outweighs everything, of course.

But in a stupid contradiction, he can’t help but miss Enjolras. The thought that Enjolras is no more - that Enjolras was never even _real_ \- leaves Grantaire sick to his stomach, feeling hollow somehow.

They stroll along the Seine in the Paris Grantaire grew up in, a world away but now filled with echoes from 1832, echoes he can’t ignore. He looks out at the water instead of at the Doctor, but when the Doctor offers him his hand, Grantaire’s fingers interlock his with a pang of gratitude. It is bliss enough to have him back, even as all they do is walk, pigeons scattering before them, both of them lost in thought.

Eventually, though, he voices the question that has been tearing away at him more than anything.

“Your - _Enjolras_ ’ - friends,” - he can’t bring himself to say _my_ , not yet - “Combeferre and Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire and the others -” He pauses again, struggling to find the right way to say it. “Would they have died if we hadn’t been there?”

The Doctor doesn’t answer.

And then he does. “Oh, yes, it’s a fixed event. The June Rebellion of 1832, it was always bound to fail. Even without alien intervention, the National Guard would’ve overpowered them. The revolutionaries, well, they didn’t stand a chance.”

If that is the answer he has been expecting, if that is supposed to ease the guilt, it doesn’t help at all. Grantaire wants to scream, to start throwing punches, to kick down the walls of every building in the city. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right.

“There is nothing we could have done. Nothing we can do, not this time.”

All those lives, of all those people. Kind-hearted and courageous and good. They had the same spark as Enjolras, they were as clever and as willing and as special, and they were human, nothing more.

“They knew the risks. But they stood for something, nevertheless.”

The Doctor stops, draws Grantaire closer, fixes his gaze to him, achingly close. His eyes are brimming with patience and sympathy and understanding and Grantaire wants to drown in them.

“Grantaire, it was never for nothing. You’re right, you know, not everything in this universe can be good. There isn’t always happiness. But there are always people who will strive to change things for the better, and there will always be good people. And as long as there are, there is hope.”

And hope is a strange old thing and Grantaire doesn’t believe in a perfect world and he can’t always see the beauty everywhere, but there are people he believes in, the Doctor most of all, and for once he might be happy to do more than believe in him. Maybe, just this once, he’ll believe him, too.

 --

“How did you have your sonic screwdriver, after all that?” Grantaire pipes up, a few minutes later. “I swear I’d taken it from the TARDIS, but I didn’t ever give it to you. Did I?”

The Doctor raises his eyebrows. “Someone put it in my pocket, long before the barricade. I hadn’t paid any attention to it as a human. Apparently, someone knew I might need it that day.”

Grantaire smiles, despite it all and despite himself. “Clever kid.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's it! If people like Doctor Who AUs as much as I do, I may or may not end up writing more of them. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr as darrenjolras; you're welcome to come say hi!


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